The blog of the Department of Politics at the University of Surrey

If you’d asked me back in the spring of 2017 whether there’d be long periods of inactivity in the Article 50 process, then I’d have said no. The agenda looked so full, and time was so short, that I doubted that even the traditional closing of the shop in the Brussels summer would be able […]

In 2002, Robert Kagan famously wrote an article claiming that “the US is from Mars, the EU is from Venus.” He inferred that US belligerence in its push for war with Iraq, compared to the EU’s insistence on a diplomatic settlement, was a predictable consequence of the more masculine and feminine characteristics associated with these […]

Somewhere in Whitehall, there’s a small office. In it, a bright young thing is working hard on Brexit. As the afternoon sun bounces down to the tiny window that provides the only fresh air, a spark flares up in the bright young thing’s mind. They dash down the corridor to their line manager, bursting through […]

As we enter a period of heightened debate about customs arrangements, it’s useful to consider who holds what power in the Article 50 process. As rational choice bods like to tell us, the more people who hold vetoes, the harder it is to please them all and more chance there is of non-agreement. However, in […]

In the likely event that Donald Trump chooses to end US support for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) today, there will be a scrabble to make sense of why, and to what end the current US administration would scupper what was, for many, the most significant foreign policy achievement of his predecessor. […]

I’m being a bit of a dog with a bone on this one, mainly because no one else seems terribly interested in it. As I’ve discussed before (here and here), the transition phase of withdrawal from the EU has been taken as a given. All parties were happy to sign up to the March text, […]

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The blog of the Department of Politics at the University of Surrey, including our two research centres: the Centre for Research on the European Matrix (CRonEM) and the Centre for international intervention (Cii).